Brewing History and More Information

Brewing History

Man has been intentionally brewing for
at least the last 9,000 years.
Before that, humans and the predecessors encountered
fermented fruit.
Paleogenetics has shown
that primate ancestors of humans developed an enzyme that
could metabolize ethanol around the time they came down
out of the trees and started using the forest floor,
about 10 million years ago.
As for intentional fermentation, a beverage made from
rice, honey, and fruit was produced about 9,000 years
ago in China, about the same time that grape wine
and barley beer were first made in the Middle East.

The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh describes how the
wild man Enkidu becomes civilized and enters human society,
with drinking beer as one of the defining moments:

Enkidu does not know of eating food; of beer
[šikaram]
to drink he has not been taught.
The prostitute opened her mouth.
She said to Enkidu, "Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the
luster of life.
Drink the beer as is done in this land."
Enkidu ate the food until he was sated; of the beer
he drank seven cups.
His soul became free and cheerful,
his heart rejoiced, his face glowed.
he rubbed his hairy body.
He anointed himself with oil.
He became human.

Then there is Midas Touch, from Dogfish Head,
a re-creation of a beer from the era of the
historical Midas, from Phyrgia in
central Turkey
around 730 BC.
They worked with archeaological chemist Patrick McGovern
of the University of Pennsylvania to re-create a beverage
based on honey, barley, grapes, and saffron.
They have also made Theobroma, or
The Food of the Gods, based on
Mayan and Aztec ceremonial drinks
using data from residues of the earliest known
fermented cacao beverage from 1400-1000 BC.
For details,
see the New Yorker article,
24 Nov 2008, pp 86-99.

We also identified a mixed fermented beverage of
grape wine, barley beer, and honey mead in the
most comprehensive Iron Age drinking set ever
found, comprising numerous bronze mixing and
serving vessels and more than 100 bowls.
[....]
The major constituents of the mixed fermentation beverage
are tartaric acid and its salts (occurring naturally in
large amounts only in grape and its products, including
wine4), calcium oxalate ('beerstone', the
main precipitate of barley beer4) and
beeswax (a group of marker compounds that are not
easily filtered out from mead).
[....]

They also mention Homer's description in his Iliad
and Odyssey of a mixed fermented beverage called
kykeon, similar to what was found in Midas' tomb.
A beverage like this but with apple and cranberry in place
of grapes had long been a traditional beverage in Europe,
suggesting that the Phrygians may have been European,
maybe from northern Greece or the Balkans.

People in Scandinavia, from northwestern Denmark around
1500-1300 BC up through the first century AD on the
Swedish island of Gotland were drinking a "Nordic grog"
fermented from local ingredients including honey,
bog cranberry, lingonberry, bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper,
birch tree resin, and cereals including wheat, barley
and/or rye.
Sometimes this was mixed with grape wine imported from
southern or central Europe.
See the overviews
here and
here,
and the article
"A
biomolecular archaeological approach to
'Nordic Grog'"
[Danish Journal of Archaeology, vol 2, issue 2, 2013,
DOI: 10.1080/21662282.2013.867101].

The Hebrew word
שכר or shekhar
is derived from the Akkadian šikaru,
which means "barley beer" as used in all major
Akkadian archives.

Biblical references to beer include the following,
where "strong wine" and "strong drink" were used for
"beer" in the King James translation:

Numbers 28:7-10, it was libated to Yahweh twice daily:
And the drink offering thereof shall be the
fourth part of an hin for the one lamb:
in the holy place shalt thou cause the
strong wine [beer]
to be poured unto the LORD for a
drink offering.

Deuteronomy 14:26, the Israelites drank it
at sacrificial meals:And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever
thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep,
or for wine, or for strong drink
[beer], or for
whatsoever thy soul desireth:
and thou shalt eat there before the
LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice,
thou, and thine household,

Isaiah 24:9, its absence or poor quality
defined an unpleasant occasion:They shall not drink wine with a song;
strong drink shall be bitter
to them that drink it.

Proverbs 31:6, it was prescribed to the forlorn
to temporarily erase their troubles:Give strong drink [beer]
unto him that is ready to perish, and wine
unto those that be of heavy hearts.

Smithsonian magazine
had an article
"Dig, Drink and be Merry"
in their July-August 2011 issue (pp 38-48) about Patrick
McGovern and Dogfish Head's re-creations of some ancient
recipes.
"The Beer Archaeologist",
a version of that article, is available
here.

The
U.S. Library of Congress
has largely reconstructed
Thomas Jefferson's personal library.
Jefferson had the largest personal collection of books in
the United States in 1814, when the British burned the
U.S. Capitol and the Library of Congress.
The Congress purchased Jefferson's collection of 6,487
volumes for $23,950 in 1815.
This included
The Philosophical principles of the science of
brewing; containing Theoretic hints on improved
practice of brewing malt liquors; and Statistical
estimates of the materials for brewing,
John Richardson, 1790, LOC call number TP 569 Js.
Jefferson also owned
Smith's Distillery.
Both are awfully rare today.
However,
Google Books offers,
among others, full PDF downloads of these instructional
books: